Books!

The kindle version was free. Just bought it. It's got good reviews, but I'm always wary of these kinds of books.

Wait a second, this is not the whole book. What the fuck.

Ah, it was a "sampler" with just the first two chapters.

From the Intro:

The rigid secular humanism that dominates in our public schools and universities, in our courts, and in our media needs to give way to a distinctly Christian humanist vision. [Emphasis not mine.]

I don't think I need to read much more to get the gist of where this is going.

I've seen that before and flipped through it and was pretty unimpressed.  He brings up anecdotes from Tolkien's writing (followed by ones from Lewis, since even though he's less famous there are clearer Christian messages there) and then jumps to some barely related rule of life from his particular brand of conservative Christianity.

Norc wrote:i really wanna read som stephen king once, but i've only started reading a book that he recommended (i don't think i finished it, first book "Gone", cool book and the bully is called orc).

currently i'm kinda into science fiction. i borrowed a random selection (4 books) at the library(for research and inspiration), Jon Bing and the collective thing Bing&Bringsværd. Anyway, i am re-reading about the star ship Alexandria (a library ship) and a boy called Benji with a batcat called Mirromur. He is a sort of aprentice. He and a librarian called Mol, Kayab and lots of other people travel around between stars and planets, sharing knowledge. there are four books and i wish they were translated to english, but i don't think they are... but they are really good. I am reading the second one now. Zalt - the planet of the steam lords (roughly translated). it's about a planet where there is no fresh water and the steam lords (much like it was during the medieval ages) have monopoly on fresh water and the people are oppressed and forced to work for the lords. the books were written between 75 and 85, which makes it kinda more fun to read. The ship runs on solar winds and communicates with radio and yeah   i remember i really loved these books as a kid. i wish there was a translation...

Stephen King books usually run long. He's an okay writer, but in my opinion tends to drag. I think he writes during those long Maine winters.

For science fiction I'd recommend Larry Niven's Ringworld (the first one, don't make a mistake and start with a sequel), and Dune (same warning applies). The first is good if you are in a playful mood, the second if you are in a deeper thought type of mood (Dune has been compared to Lord of the Rings, but only if you take out the hobbits). If you want an off-kilter poetical look at life, go for Samuel Delaney short stories.

Much more could be said on the topic of Science Fiction, but that's my personal picks. Meanwhile, you can get to work translating those Norwegian writers for us.

Thanks halfy, i'll definitely look into that

Maybe i'll translate... We'll see, i'd have to borrow the first one though

I read most of Dune while I was camping (and Internet-less), and finished it off during the car ride home.  I know it's a classic and the book has been on my radar for years, and having read it, I can certainly see why people like it so much.  The ecology parts were made that much richer because I was camping at the beach amidst actual dunes while reading most of it.  The mystical parts raised my eyebrows a couple times, but I was able to go with it for the most part.  The world-building was very interesting, although the amount of jargon flung at the reader in the beginning meant that I was constantly referring to the glossary and unintentionally spoiled myself on some plot points by skimming through the Appendices trying to make sense of things.  The slow pace of the first two sections really helps to give the characters life and make the whole setting feel real.  There were a couple points where I was like "should it really take three chapters to climb down a rock formation?", but the desert and the spiritual elements were important and I think the pace helped them come to the forefront, where they might otherwise have been obscured by the interesting political plot.

Despite all this, however, I had a bad taste left in my mouth by the final section of the book ("The Prophet").  After the first two sections had moved slowly and steadily through perhaps several months of time, we open the third section with a two-year timeskip and have to take a bunch of time to get reacquainted with the characters.  Then each chapter seems to jump forward by a couple of months, leaving many crucial plot developments to occur offscreen and then be recapped for us either by characters or by Paul's visions.  What events we do get to witness are often very condensed.  The climax of the book, when (50 year old SPOILERS to follow) Paul receiving the Emperor's entourage in the hall in Arrakeen, feels like half a dozen chapters condensed into a single scene.  Characters keep breaking off to have private conversations while everyone else presumably twiddles their thumbs until the muttering stops, and negotiations pause for several different confrontations and even a major fight scene.  Then, the book just stops in the middle of the scene, with vague indications of what will follow but not even an attempt at a denouement, much less an epilogue.  I know there are many, many sequels, but for a book that was published stand-alone, especially one that is 800 pages long, I expect more resolution than this.

I feel a little awkward making these criticisms since I know the book is a widely-revered classic and I only just finished it, but these flaws seem really, really glaring to me.  After almost 600 pages of slow-paced, intricately developed, very character-intimate writing, the final 200 pages feel like a completely different author just came in and tried to cram a chopped-down summary of the rest of the story.  We only get to hear of most of Paul's adventures and accomplishments (and his relationship with Chani is similarly told rather than shown), and despite him being surrounded by multitudes of people (mainly Fremen), all but a small handful are a faceless, frequently nameless, mob who exist solely to help the plot along.  Sure, it would have taken at least one further book of a similar length to get to the same end point if this condensing hadn't occurred, but the shift in style (and the concurrent drop in quality) are baffling to me.  Maybe Herbert's editors forced this on him?  I got nothing.

the world-building was very interesting, although the amount of jargon flung at the reader in the beginning- Eldo

This is why it took me about three attempts to get ast the opening, and I only persevered because I had friends recommending the books to me so much.

But I did love them once I got over that- I liked all the Bene Gesserit stuff, the breeding programs and all that stuff.And I thought the idea of the Mentats was genius and the whole Orange Catholic Bible and the prohibition on machines that think like humans.
I also like all the religious stuff,Dune was the first place in my life I came across the concept of a jihad.

I'm glad you mostly enjoyed it Eldo. I have fond memories of that book, though I haven't read it for a couple decades.  

I'm sure the flaws you mention are there, but bear in mind that it was written in the early 60's as a pulp sci fi novel when fantasy didn't even exist as a genre and when breaking literary conventions was cool.  

I suspect if you were to have read it between Catch 22 and Fahrenheit 451, you'd find the structural issues would be almost invisible.

David H wrote:I'm glad you mostly enjoyed it Eldo. I have fond memories of that book, though I haven't read it for a couple decades.  

I'm sure the flaws you mention are there, but bear in mind that it was written in the early 60's as a pulp sci fi novel when fantasy didn't even exist as a genre and when breaking literary conventions was cool.  

I suspect if you were to have read it between Catch 22 and Fahrenheit 451, you'd find the structural issues would be almost invisible.

Thanks Dave. I haven't read a lot of old science fiction, but your post made me start thinking. Asimov's Foundation is one of the oldest sci-fi books I've read, and IIRC it's less a novel and more a series of short stories that each have different characters and are separated by decades if not centuries. But this sort of zoom-in, zoom-out style is probably necessary to tell a story on the timeframe that Asimov envisioned. Dune took place on a much shorter timeframe and follows a core group of characters for the vast majority of the book, and the structure is fairly conventional for the first three-quarters of the novel, so I struggle to understand the reasoning behind the changes in the final quarter. But I'm not very familiar with mid-century sci-fi.

How about mid-20th century in general? Jack Karouac, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey, Robert Heinlein?

There's a lot of drugs going on then, a lot of rebellion against structure for the sake of structure. These were the authors, with Frank Herbert, that were being read by the first generation of hippies. All that stuff in Dune about Spice was new and a bit dangerous to mainstream readers of the time, like Timothy Leary and LSD.

The more I think about it, the more surprised I am that you find the first part of the book to be traditionally structured. Maybe I'll have to go back and reread it this winter. I'll bet I find it to be a different book now!

The complaints about changes in pace and tone can be applied to Lord of the Rings even more so than Dune, so I don't really understand the problem.  Except that Herbert is not as great a writer as Tolkien, so can't get away with as much.  It never bothered me though   seems like normal story telling where as the canvas becomes more vast you must focus on snippets and vignettes to keep the story human.

I agree the ending feels somewhat abrupt, and an extra page or even a paragraph where the reader can zoom out to bring everything together would help this feeling; but if you reread it I think you'll find Herbert actually did this but in a rather fragmented way.  It's encapsulated in Irulan's quote at the beginning of the chapter: "and the time came when the universe stood like a giant wheel poised to turn, and Arrakis was its hub..."

Anyway, the rather breathtaking visions of the Fremen and the desert ecology, the Butlerian Jihad and its after effects: the Bene Gesserit, the Mentats, and the Spacing Guild; the justification for going back to hand-to-hand combat....the list just goes on....it's one of the richest intellectual feasts in literature.  Ringworld is the only book that compares in density of new ideas, but given the more scatterbrained presentation and without the rich cultural backdrop it will never attain the same literary significance.

Don't get me wrong, I still really liked Dune.  I hadn't really thought to compare it to Ringworld, in part because it's been so long since I read (and loved) that, but also because I agree that it's not as rich.  As for pace, I get what you're saying about LOTR, but I find it to be more satisfying since, even though the pace accelerates considerably in the second and third volumes, it never feels truncated.

NB can anyone say if the Dune sequels compare to the original?  I've heard really bad things about the Brian Herbert-authored ones, but what about the ones that Frank H. wrote himself?

the Frank Herbert sequels are okay, but don't really compare to having a new world introduced to you in Dune. The freshness is over. Good for maintaining the fix, but feels somewhat jaded in comparison.

Don't touch the Brian Herbert ones. I can barely make it through the first page - it's literally that bad.

I have a different view to Halfy on the sequels (F. Herbert ones) I am a big fan of Messiah and Children of Dune.
The philosophical stuff in Messiah in particular appeals to me, and I love the vast fields of time involved.
The events of the first book are so far in the past by those books that they have become the source of religions and been mythologised, and I thought that was handled exceptionally well.

As to the other books, I have two of them on my shelf and I have yet to get past the first few chapters in either of them- I thought they accurately got the universe these books take place in well enough, but they lack the insight and the philosophical thought and the observation on politics and on human nature that for me are the best things about the original series. And as a result they feel lightweight and pale imitations.

If you enjoyed Dune, I'd recommend continuing with Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, because as I recall it makes a fairly complete story arc.

Also, has it been mentioned that all of the early Dune books were originally written and published as serials in pulp sci-fi magazines? I think it's pedigree as pulp gives it extra street cred.   

I didn't know they were first done as serials!  They don't seem to have that compartmentalized feeling to them.

I do agree the next two books fill out the story arc, making the end of Dune feel less abrupt.  But the characters now have a slight feeling of 'been there, done that' about them.  Even the children don't escape, as Leto and Ghani have genetic memory.  Just not as fresh feeling to me.

I had no idea they were serials either- hard to imagine as they are so dense in information.

halfwise wrote:I didn't know they were first done as serials!  They don't seem to have that compartmentalized feeling to them.

I had to double check my memory. From Wikipedia:

After his novel The Dragon in the Sea was published in 1957, Herbert traveled to Florence, Oregon, at the north end of the Oregon Dunes. Here, the United States Department of Agriculture was attempting to use poverty grasses to stabilize the sand dunes. Herbert claimed in a letter to his literary agent, Lurton Blassingame, that the moving dunes could "swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways." Herbert's article on the dunes, "They Stopped the Moving Sands", was never completed – and only published decades later in The Road to Dune – but its research sparked Herbert's interest in ecology.

Herbert spent the next five years researching, writing, and revising a literary work that was eventually serialized in Analog magazine from 1963 to 1965 as two shorter works, Dune World and The Prophet of Dune . Herbert dedicated his work "to the people whose labors go beyond ideas into the realm of 'real materials'—to the dry-land ecologists, wherever they may be, in whatever time they work, this effort at prediction is dedicated in humility and admiration." The serialized version was expanded, reworked, and submitted to more than twenty publishers, each of whom rejected it. The novel, Dune, was finally accepted and published by Chilton Books, a printing house better known for publishing auto repair manuals.

Dune Messiah is a science fiction novel by Frank Herbert, the second in a series of six novels. It was originally serialized in Galaxy magazine in 1969.

Children of Dune is a 1976 science fiction novel by Frank Herbert, third in a series of six novels set in his Dune universe. Initially selling over 75,000 copies, it became the first hardcover best-seller ever in the science fiction field.[1] The novel was critically well-received for its gripping plot, action, and atmosphere,[2] and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1977.[3] It was originally serialized in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in 1976, and was the last Dune novel to be serialized before book publication.

It would be cool to track down some of those old issues!

The couple books that followed are often judged as inferior quality. I wonder if the serialization keep him more in the moment, hence more in tune with the writer's craft?

That makes sense to me. Writing a good serial is hard. Every single installment has to engage the reader and leave them wanting more.

Most aren't worth binding together into a novel when they're done, but those that are worth it will have an immediacy all the way through them that most novelists don't need to bother with.

$%#@ I really shouldn't, but now I think I've got to go dig out my Dune books and look through them. You all are such a bad influence on me!

Has anyone read Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrel?
I recently purchased it at a used book store to bring my purchases up to a round 20 dollars (five books I bought, not bad for three of them being hardbacks I bought). I remember reading it several years ago and also remembered it enjoying it quite a lot.
For the uninitiated, it is kind of a mixture of faery, practical English wizardy, and the Napoleonic Age.

I have not, but I heard about it for the first time a couple of months ago and was very intrigued by it.

Well, you can't ask for more than that. It's nice revisionist writing. Similar (but far more magical!) to that dragons-as-ships series based in the same time period. I forget the name of the books, but it's a similar idea.